Selling of Transhumanism; “Body Hacking” being made Cool

( ~ ED Google glass was permanently shelved when Google-iites went into bars with the Glass and got callled “glassholes” and the name stuck. The Google glass CPU was located directly over the subjects temple to alter brain wave frequencies. Once they can hack inside your brain, it’s game over for your very soul is now theirs. Technology is much more advanced as to brain hacking than most are aware. See here.)

Neil Harbisson, an artist from Barcelona, has a camera implanted in the back of his head, which he says allows him to listen to colors

If there’s a rock star in the body-hacking movement, it’s Neil Harbisson, a colorblind artist from Barcelona who persuaded a doctor to implant a camera in the back of his head. The antenna, as he calls it, essentially lets Harbisson listen to colors by detecting the dominant color in front of him and translating it into musical notes.

The way he tells it, a medical ethics committee in Europe had refused to sign off on the operation, but a doctor agreed to perform the surgery anonymously. From it, Harbisson emerged with a camera connected to a device on the back of his skull, its lens dangling in front of his face on a rod that arcs over his head.

As he walked the streets of Austin, he described how he perceived the world: the red traffic light sounded like an A note; the green grass sounded like an F.

In his keynote address at the conference, Harbisson said the first time he heard those colors in his sleep, he felt truly cyborg. Now, he no longer identifies as human but as a “cybernetic organism.”

“If we define ourselves as organisms, suddenly our group is wider,” he said. “We are on the same level as an insect, or as a cat, or as a plant.”

Harbisson is well aware of how the world perceives him. He moved from Barcelona to New York City in search of “peace” with another friend in the transhumanist movement, Moon Ribas. Ribas has an electronic device in her arm that she said vibrates when there is an earthquake anywhere in the world.

On more than one occasion, people have tried to rip off his antenna, Harbisson said. That’s part of the reason why he co-founded the Cyborg Foundation to advocate for “cyborg rights.”

When asked if he’s ever thought about just taking the antenna off, Harbisson demurred.

“To me, it’s much stronger, the wish to sense what’s around me, than the fact that people keep annoying me,” he said, adding that maybe, in the future, as others get new senses, he’ll be considered normal.

The “body hacking” movement is about implanting into the human body technology such as RFID chips, cameras and even LED lights. By bypassing health and ethical issues associated transhumanism, this body hacking pushes this movement to strange new frontiers.

As stated in my previous articles about the subject, transhumanism has been heavily promoted in mass media in the past years, whether it be through movies, music videos, video games and documentaries. Often, the word “transhumanism” isn’t even used. Instead, we simply show how a robotic enhancement “upgrades” the human body and makes it cooler, effectively selling the idea to people who believe they are being entertained – especially young people.

A by-product of this trend is “body hacking”, a movement that forgoes the ethical and philosophical questions associated with transhumanism to go right into drilling robotic parts onto one’s body. While many of us dread the day when microchips implants will be a requirement in a dystopian society, some people actually pay to have it done to them.